On leaving Tilshead, as on leaving Berwick St. James, Winterbourne Stoke, and Orcheston, I was free of houses; and of the few that lay in the hollows of the Plain only one was visible—a small one on my right a quarter of a mile away among ricks and elm trees—until I came to Joan-a-Gore’s. It is a hedgeless road, with more or less wide margins of rough grass, along which proceed two lines of poplars, some dead, some newly planted, all unprosperous and resembling the sails of windmills. A league of ploughland on either hand was broken only by a clump or two on the high ridges and a rick on the lower. As it was Sunday no white and black teams were crossing these spaces, sowing or scarifying. The rooks of Joan-a-Gore’s flew back and forth, ignorant of the falconer; the pewit brandished himself in the air; the lark sang continually; on one of the dead poplars a corn bunting delivered his unvaried song, as if a handful of small pebbles dropped in a chain dispiritedly. Nobody was on the road, it being then two o’clock, except a young soldier going to meet a girl. The rain came, but was gone again before I reached Joan-a-Gore’s. The farm-house, the spacious farm-yard and group of irregular, shadowy, thatched buildings, and the surrounding rookery elms, all on a gently-sloping ground next to the road—this is the finest modern thing on the Plain. The farm itself is but a small, slated house, gray-white in colour, with a porch and five front windows, half hid among elm trees; but the whole group probably resembles a Saxon chief’s homestead. The trees make a nearly continuous copse with the elms and ashes that stand around and above the thatched cart lodges and combined sheds and cottages at Joan-a-Gore’s Cross. No hedge, wall, or fence divides this group from my road or from the Ridge Way crossing it, and I turned into one of the doorless cart lodges to eat. I sat on a wagon shaft, looking out north over the Ridge Way and the north edge of the Plain. Where it passed the cart lodge the Ridge Way was a dusty farm track; but on the other side of the crossing it was a fair road, leading past a new farm group towards Imber. Chickens peeked round me in the road dust and within the shed. Sparrows chattered in the thatch. The bells of sheep folded in neighbouring root fields tinkled. In the rookery the rooks cawed, and nothing intimated that the falcon had killed one. The young soldier had met his girl, and was walking back with her hand in his. The heavy dark sagging clouds let out some rain without silencing the larks. As the sun came out again a trapful of friends of the cottagers drove up. The trap was drawn up alongside of me with a few stares: the women went in; the men put away the horse and strolled about. Well, I could not rest here when I had finished eating. Perhaps Sunday had tainted the solitude and quiet; I know not. So I mounted and rode on north-westward.
The road was beginning to descend off the Plain. The poplars having come to an end, elms lined it on both sides. When the descent steepened the roadside banks became high and covered in arum, parsley, nettle, and ground ivy, and sometimes elder and ivy. No hedgerow on the left hid the great waves of the Plain towards Imber, and the fascinating hollow of the Warren close at hand. The slabby ploughland sinks away to a sharp-cut, flat-bottomed hollow of an oblong tendency, enclosed by half-wooded, green terraced banks all round except at the entrance, which is towards the road. This is the Warren, a most pleasant thing to see, a natural theatre unconsciously improved by human work, but impossible to imitate entirely by art, and all the better for being empty.
Nearing the foot of the descent the road on the left is blinded by a fence, so that I could hardly see the deep wooded cleave parallel to me, and could only hear the little river running down it to Lavington. Very clear and thin and bright went this water over the white and dark stones by the wayside, as I came down to the forge at West Lavington and the “Bridge” inn. West Lavington is a street of about two miles of cottages, a timber-yard, inns, a great house, a church, and gardens, with interruptions from fields. All Saints’ Church stands upon a steep bank on the left, a towered church with a staircase corner turret and an Easter flag flying. Round about it throng the portly box tombs and their attendant headstones, in memory of the Meads, Saunderses, Bartlets, Naishes, Webbs, Browns, Allens, and the rest. Among the Browns is James Brown, shepherd “for thirty-nine years,” who died in 1887, and was then but forty-six. The trees and thatched and tiled roofs of the village hid the Plain from the churchyard. Inside, the church wall was well lined with tablets to the Tinkers, the Smiths, and the family of Amor; but the principal thing is the recumbent marble figure of Henry Danvers, twenty-one years old when he died in 1654. He is musing over a book which appears to be slipping from his grasp. The figure of his mother, Elizabeth, near him is also holding but not reading a book. Between the two an earlier female effigy, head on cushion, slumbers in a recess. Under one of the largest tablets a tiny stone with quaint lettering was inset to keep in mind Henevera Yerbury, who died at Coulston on March 4, 1672.
Instead of going straight on through Potterne and Devizes, I turned to the left by the Dauntsey Agricultural College, and entered a road which follows the foot of the Plain westward to Westbury and Frome. Thus I had the north wall of the Plain always visible on my left as I rode through Little Cheverell, Erlestoke, Tinhead, and Edington. The road twisted steeply downhill between high banks of loose earth and elm roots, half draped by arum, dandelion, ground ivy, and parsley, and the flowers of speedwell and deadnettle; then up again to Little Cheverell. Here I mounted a bank of nettles and celandines under elm trees into the churchyard, and between two pairs of pollard limes to the door of the church, and walked round it and saw the two box tombs smothered in ivy, and the spotted old carved stones only two feet out of the ground. Behind the church rises Strawberry Hill. A cow was lowing in the farmyard over the road. Fowls were scratching deeper and deeper the holes among the elm roots on the church bank.
Then for a distance the road traversed hedgeless arable levels that rose gently in their young green garments up to the Plain. I looked back, and saw the vast wall of the Plain making an elbow at West Lavington, and crooking round to a clump on a straw-coloured hill above Urchfont, the farthest point visible. Before me stretched the woods of Erlestoke Park, crossing the road and slanting narrow and irregular up and along the hillside, lining it with beech and fir for over a mile, under the name of Hill Wood. The road dipped steeply through the grounds of the park, and its high banks of gray sand, dressed in dog’s mercury and ivy, and overhung by pine trees, shut out everything on either hand. Several private bridges crossed the deep road, and a woman had stopped that her child might shout, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” under the arch of one of them. Emerging from these walls, the road cut through a chain of ponds. Erlestoke Park lay on both sides. On the right its deer fed by the new church under a steep rise of elms and sycamores; on the left rooks cawed among the elms and chestnuts scattered on lawn that sloped up to Hill Wood.
A timber-yard, a “George and Dragon,” and many neat thatched cottages compose the wayside village of Erlestoke. Water was flashing down the gutters. Quite a number of people were on the road, but no one could tell me the meaning of the statuary niched on the cottage walls. It must have come from “some old ancient place,” they said. An old man who had dwelt for eighteen years in one of the cottages thus adorned, and had worked as a boy with old men that knew the place, could tell me no more. Some of the figures were nudes—one a female, with the coy hands of Venus, rising from her bath—others classical, and symbolic or grotesque: all astonishing in that position, ten feet up on a cottage wall, and unlikely to have come from the old church in Erlestoke Park.
Not a mile of this road was without cottagers strolling with their children or walking out to see friends in the beautiful weather. But just outside Erlestoke I met two slightly dilapidated women, not cottage women, with a perambulator, and twenty yards behind them two weatherbeaten, able-bodied men in caps, better dressed than the women. As I went by, one of them gave a shout, which I did not take as meant for me. He continued to shout what I discovered to be “Sir” in a loud voice until I turned round and had to get down. They advanced to meet me. The shorter man, a stocky fellow of not much past thirty, with very little nose, thin lips, and a strong, shaven chin, hastened up to me and inquired, in an unnecessarily decided manner, the road to Devizes, and if there were many houses on the way. The taller man, slender and very upright, with bright blue eyes, had by this time come up, and the two began to beg, telling rapidly, loudly, emphatically, and complainingly, a combined story into which the Titanic was introduced. One of them pointed out that he was wearing the button of the Seamen’s Guild. They wanted me to look at papers. The two women, who were still walking on, they claimed as their wives. The more they talked the less inclined did I feel to give them money. Though they began to call down a blessing on me, I still refused. They persisted. The shorter one was not silent while I mounted my bicycle. So I rode away out of reach of their blessings without giving them anything. I tried to explain to myself why. For sixpence I might have purchased two loaves or three pints for them, and for myself blessings and possibly some sort of glow. I did not know nearly enough of mankind to condemn them as mere beggars; besides, mere beggars must live, if any one must. But they were very glib and continuous. Also they were hearty men in good health—which should have been a reason for giving them what I could afford. The strongest reason against it was probably alarm at being given some responsibility at one blow for five bodies in some ways worse off than myself, and shame, too, at the act of handing money and receiving thanks for it. My conscience was uneasy. I could not appease it with sixpence, nor with half a sovereign, which might have been thought generous if I had told the story. If I was to do anything I ought to have seen the thing through, to have accompanied these people and seen that they slept dry and ate enough, and got work or a pension. To give them money was to take mean advantage of the fact that in half a mile or so I could stow them away among the mysteries and miseries of the world. Too late I concluded that I ought to have listened to their story to the end, to have read their papers and formed an opinion, and to have given what I could, because in any case I should be none the worse, and they might be the better, if only to the extent of three pints between them. I made a resolution—a sort of a resolution—to give sixpence in future to every beggar, and leave the question of right or wrong till—
“When the Archangel’s trump shall sound
And slumbering mortals bid to rise,”